Let’s Replace Climate Hope with Earth Love
Maybe this will take us to a new place
For many years, the climate debate has been caught between two poles—the hopeful optimists and the despairing doomers. I started out primarily with the optimists, believing that we can solve this problem with the rapid adoption of new technologies. We could use non-emitting sources of electricity and electrify our major energy needs, thereby eliminating the need to burn fossil fuels and the emissions that come from them. Then, we could use carbon capture technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere, thereby neutralizing the biggest source of our greenhouse gas problem. There was room for hope.
Today, it is harder to hold that position. During the last twenty years or more, people have been hoping that we could keep global warming to less that 1.5°C (2.7°F). Scientists told us that if we can, we can probably avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Unfortunately, in 2024, we hit that mark of 1.5°C, and emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentrations are still going up. Climate change is going to intensify. This is what leads many to despair.
The question is, what is the role of hope now?
Jane Goodall wrote a book called Hope in which she suggests that hope may be an instinct, or maybe a survival trait. Both ideas are compatible with the fundamental thing that hope does: It projects a future. When we believe this future to be better than the past or better than our fears would dictate, we call ourselves hopeful. When we see the future going the other way, we tend to be become hopeless.
For example, Trump supporters today tell me they are filled with hope. They seem to believe in the Make America Great Again vision—that more oil drilling will lower their costs, or that deportations will give them more opportunity to succeed, or that hacking away at government employees will lower their taxes. These combine to create more hope in the future for them.
On the other hand, non-MAGA people are overwhelmed with a sense of hopelessness. Climate change is getting worse and the new American leadership seems hell bent on making it worse. We are watching the destruction of our democratic institutions and do not see how this makes America great. And those who are paying attention know that bird flu is coming and we remember the chaos of a Trump-led administration during the last pandemic. Hope for a better future is pretty hard to sustain.
How can two groups of people looking at the same world respond in such opposite ways? To me, this makes the whole idea of hope suspect. The fact that one man and the same exact world can inspire such incredible hope and such hopeless despair at the same time tells me that hope is an untrustworthy guide.
The reason is this: hope is a focus on the future, not on the present. It’s opposite—worry, anxiety, or despair—is equally focused on the future. Both take our eyes off of the present. This has many dire consequences.
Future thinking focuses on things over which we do not have control, so the energy that goes into them is completely useless. Worry about climate change does nothing to solve it and makes our own lives miserable. The problem is bigger than our individual actions can effectively mitigate. An entire system needs to change and that requires the concerted effort of millions of other people. In such an environment, hope turns quickly into worry, anxiety, and despair when we stay focused on the future.
At the same time, many other people pretended that greenhouse gases and climate change wouldn’t matter—a kind of back door expression of hope, I guess. They still cling to that hope. They project their hope and embody it on the new president.
For these reasons, I have been trying to release hope. Let it go. Because when hope leaves, so does worry and fear. The mechanism to do so is staying in the present moment. What is happening right here, right now? What happens when I sit down next to a tree and breathe? What comes up in the present moment?
What I find in that moment is love. Love for nature, place, people, and things. Love for the moment. Love for the tree. Love for breath itself. Life can be loved. It can be experienced and lived and loved. Now. In the moment. In this moment.
As the future dissipates in the imagination, I am no longer limited by the sense that everything is futile. As hope gives way to love, I can see what is essential now. Instead of acting from the future, I can act from the now. I come back from the future to the present moment, and then I can act with joy. The choices we make from true joy and real love are almost always the right ones. In the now, I choose to plant a garden because it is joyful. In the now, I write what I see and explore into my experience in writing without getting lost in the drama of the future unfolding. In the now, I look with eyes of love at the forest around me. I’m not talking about willful ignorance or navel-gazing, but rather an active connection to what is in the moment. This enables me to see through the worry and the fear. It also enables me to see clearly through the hope. I love what is in this day, right here and right now.
When we love a place, we take care of it. Most people know this feeling in their homes or in nature. We love our home and neighborhoods. From that love, more love emanates into the world. And that love will be a key ingredient in our eventual success.
I know this sounds pollyannish, but it is not. Love is a survival strategy. Many terrible events have already occurred due to climate change. For millions of people, it is already too late to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. It is already causing enormous suffering. Wherever we are there id beauty and wherever we are there is risk from climate change. It is going to get worse and there are going to be more such events. Hope and anxiety are poor ways to live, and they tend to freeze action. To love a place gives us active engagement with it now and reverberates the possibility of loving larger and larger spaces, eventually including the entire planet. At that point, love stewards everything.
Love also gives us joy in the here and now, something hope and hopelessness can never do. Love opens hearts. Love frees us from fear. Without fear, we can and will act more in accordance with the planet’s energies and needs. Indeed, few things are more powerful than such love.
Anthony Signorelli
Tony, Thanks for this essay. I also realized a few months ago that the best place to find peace is in focusing on the present moment. I like your addition of seeing through the eyes of “love”. Another thought experiment I am using when feeling afraid of the ‘cult of bullies’, is to ask myself, “Am I safe now?”. I ask myself this as many times as needed until I can land the experience of being safe.
Thank you for this post. We can all do this if we choose too. Every morning when I come down to the kitchen, in the here and now I see pheasants on the lawn, all sorts of tits on the bird feeders, squirrels ( digging up our lawn!), the horses in our stables, our dogs greeting me as if I had been away for months. That’s love, and it feels so much more powerful than hope or anxiety.